


Aviophilia

by JiM



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-05
Updated: 2011-02-05
Packaged: 2017-10-15 10:02:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiM/pseuds/JiM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is it better to be thought a phobic or a dipsomaniac?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aviophilia

Leonard McCoy is not afraid of flying.

 

Oh, he knows the dangers of atmospheric and sub-orbital flight as well as anyone who can calculate probabilities does.  He knows how safe shuttle protocols really are and he is perfectly willing to trust his life to them.  What he was not willing to do that fine autumn morning in Iowa was to trust his emotions to them.

 

He knew he’d been drinking way too much in the weeks following the decree and custody hearing and failed appeal.  So he’d stopped.  It didn’t actually make him feel any better about any of it, but at least he’d stopped pumping massive amounts of depressants into his system to facilitate the rest of his epic dissolution.

 

Oh, the nausea and anxiety attack were absolutely real, that morning in the shuttle. He hadn’t lied about those at all.  But their cause?  Very different from anything he’d growled out to that green little ensign who’d rousted him out of his nice private haven.

 

He had joined Starfleet.  He had had to join Starfleet if he ever wanted to see his kid again.  “Two years, maybe three, of exemplary citizenship, Dr. McCoy, and we’ll be ready to entertain the notion of granting you joint custody again,” the mediating weasel had offered. 

 

The hell of it was – he couldn’t blame them, not really.  The accident had been his fault; he’d been impaired and he was just lucky Joanna hadn’t been hurt.  Hell, if the situation had been reversed and Jocelyn had put his kid into that kind of danger, they would never have found her body. Jocelyn is letting him off lightly with court-supervised visitations until he has demonstrated his reformation. Hence, Starfleet.

 

A good doctor could finish the medical track at Starfleet in three years. After that, a planet-side posting at a lieutenant commander’s salary would allow him to demonstrate financial and emotional stability until the cows came home. And until his daughter came home.

 

He is committed to his plan and it’s a good one. But that doesn’t mean he is entirely above mourning what he’s lost and what he’s thrown away and every other damned thing that’s brought him to this moment on a shuttle in Cornhole, Iowa surrounded by kids greener than the corn outside.  It had all  just overwhelmed him and he would have appreciated a few private minutes to get his damned dignity back but that was apparently not meant to be.

 

Jim Kirk knows Leonard McCoy is not afraid of flying. 

 

McCoy figures that Kirk worked it out about two seconds after they met.  His eyes had lingered just a little too long on the side of McCoy’s face where the damned ensign hadn’t let him alone long enough to scoop some water up to clean away the tear tracks.  Scrubbing his cheeks dry against his sleeve hadn’t gotten rid of the evidence, damn it.

 

No, he knows that McCoy is a liar, not a phobic.  But Jim Kirk, bless him, is a liar, too.  He just nods and cocks his eyebrow and plays along.  They water the lie with a shared flask.  It’s that first kindness that Jim pays him that seals the deal and makes McCoy’s next shuttle-based lie inevitable.




 

Thank God for small favors.


End file.
